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Excuse Us, Nancy Pelosi
DAVE LINDORFF
Counterpunch
Tuesday Aug 21, 2007
It's not just the Constitution that's suffering
because of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's nutty and unprincipled
"impeachment-off-the-table" position blocking any effort
to impeach President Bush or Vice President Cheney for their many
crimes and abuses of power.
Her position on impeachment is helping
to kill the Democratic Party too, by driving away not just progressive
members of the party, but independents who voted for Democrats
last November expecting some action in defense of the Constitution
as well as stopping g the war. .
I see this anger welling up among progressives
and independents everywhere I travel, as people say they've simply
had it with the Democrats. The support of the party for a bill
continuing funding for the war through September was terrible.
The Democrats' rush to pass a bill granting Bush the authority
to spy without a warrant on Americans, and to expand the power
to spy domestically well beyond phones and internet to even include
break-ins was a last straw.
(Article continues below)
My own little call for people so sign an
"I Quit This Party" petition has seen a jump from 300
to now 400 signers. When it gets to 500 I'll be sending the list
off to Pelosi, as well as to the offices of Senate Majority Leader
Harry Reid and Democratic National Committee Chair Howard Dean.
Four or five hundred party defectors may
seem like small loss, but it reflects a larger trend across the
country.
Here's a letter I got from the head of
a group of active Democrats in central Pennsylvania--the very
kind of heartland area that Democrats will need if they are going
to win the presidency and hang on to or make gains in Congress
next year.
Here's Kathy Ember, a Democratic Committee
member in Pennsylvania, and president of the Kutztown Democratic
Club:
I am the president of a very active grassroots
Democratic club just outside Philadelphia in PA. Recently, I
got an email from Nancy Pelosi, asking all of us to help build
the grassroots.
EXCUSE me Nancy, but we have been working
our butts off out here for years trying to do just that. WE
are the ones that put that Democrats back in power in Congress.
We've been there for you, but you have let us down by not holding
the current administration responsible for their crimes.
Not only are you losing us...you are
making it impossible for us to "build the grassroots".
Do you know how people look at you now when you ask them to
join the Democrats? They laugh in your face. Why, they want
to know, should we join or support a party that has done nothing
toward getting out of Iraq or impeaching this president?
I am in contact with other Democratic
clubs across PA. Some have recently changed the word "Democrats"
in their name to a lower case "d". Others have abandoned
their association with the Democrats altogether and have formed
instead "citizen action groups."
When will the Democrats in Washington
wake up and realize that it's not impeachment that will hurt
the party...it is the lack of it.
I believe that the aptly named Ember is
just one spark in a prairie fire that is going to sweep away the
conservative Democratic establishment in 2008. Whether it is by
turning to third party candidates, or just sitting out the next
election, these angry and frustrated Democrats are showing that
they've been betrayed one too many times by the Democratic Party.
Either Pelosi--who is facing an election
challenge by Cindy Sheehan in her own San Francisco district--better
do an about face and open the path to impeachment of Bush and/or
Cheney. Otherwise, she and her fellow party leaders are going
to find themselves either ousted in primaries, or back in the
position of minority "leaders" in 2009.
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INFOWARS:
BECAUSE THERE'S A WAR ON FOR YOUR MIND
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